For Want of a Nail
by winter machine
Summary: "Tell you what, kiddo.  When you're twenty-one, if you're still not happy with 'em, I'll fix you."  Amelia when she was still Amy, the Shepherds when they were still married, and Mark - who has always been Mark.


**My three touchstones: Amelia backstory, Mark, and married Derek/Addison. Adult themes. Reviews are always appreciated and I'm always curious to know what readers think.**

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><p><em><strong>For Want of a Nail<strong>_

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><p>Amy scrunches up her face. She doesn't really want the blue powder on her eyes but she accepts the swipe of unfamiliar fingers on her lids anyway, testing it out. They're sitting apart from the others on the adirondack chairs under the big pine and the warm breeze moves the older woman's long, shiny hair.<p>

"There! Very sexy." She makes a silly face with her lips pursed. Amy just watches her without talking, feeling a funny tickle of discomfort at the word. "You look beautiful," Beth adds.

"I'm not," Amy mumbles.

"You're going to be gorgeous when you grow up," she purrs.

Amy looks down at her knobby knees and the bruise on her left shin. She's wearing a pair of old yellow thongs Nancy left behind and there's dirt under her toenails. Mom told her to take a bath before the barbecue but she wanted to finish her book instead, and the floors of the treehouse her dad built a dozen years ago are soil-flecked and splintery. Her feet are a mess. Beth's toenails look as shiny as her hair with red polish.

She smiles at Amy. "Mark's told me so much about you."

Amy nods, picking at a splinter under her thumb.

"Did he tell you I was coming today?"

Amy shakes her head. Beth looks a little disappointed and Amy almost feels bad for her.

"Have you met any of Mark's other friends?" Her voice sounds casual-on-purpose. "Girls, I mean."

Amy scratches at a mosquito bite on her calf. It's not like Beth really wants to talk to Amy. She just wants to talk about Mark. Amy doesn't know much but she knows when people want something from her and she knows how to do everything but give it to them.

"Oh, lots of times," Amy shrugs. Beth's face falls and Amy pinches the skin at her wrist so she won't giggle. "Loads of them," she repeats. "He brings them here all the time."

Beth shoves the makeup back into her big white bag and scowls while Amy hides a smile behind her hand.

Beth catches her looking at the way her sundress dips low in the front when she leans down to collect her makeup bag.

"I'm going to get them fixed."

"Huh?"

She poses a bit, looking a little like one of Amy's barbies. The one she microwaved for a few seconds before Nancy caught her.

"These." She gestures at her chest. "I mean, they're fine, but I want them to be perfect, you know?"

Amy stares. They look okay to her. They're bigger than Nancy and Kath's, smaller than Sharon and Mom's. Amy doesn't have anything at all yet, not like stupid Camille Foster at school who already has two training bras.

Maybe there's something wrong with her.

"Kath..." she approaches her sister, who's still at the big table picking over her lunch and looking through one of those big dumb bride magazines with Sharon.

"Amy, go help Mom in the kitchen." Kathleen doesn't look up from her plate of salad. Derek's stoking the barbecue and Nancy's in the kitchen with Mom. She always helps.

Amy stands in front of Mark, crestfallen. He puts down his half-eaten hot dog and turns to her. "Why the long face?"

"I don't have anything!"

"Any what? Here," Mark scoops half the potato chips off his plate and holds them out to her.

"No, I mean..._anything_." She gestures at the top half of her body.

"Oh. Well, but you - you're just -" for a second she fears he's going to say _you're just a kid_ and she holds her a breath a little, knowing that for some reason it will break her heart if he does - but he says "-just still growing, that's all."

"I'm a freak." She scowls.

"Nope. You're perfect," Mark says.

"Am not." She lounges against the arm of his chair, scrunching her toes.

"Tell you what, kiddo. When you're twenty-one, if you're still not happy with 'em, I'll fix you."

"Really?"

"What are you two whispering about?" Her mother bends over the table next to them, setting down two big bowls, and Amy gulps.

Panicked, she turns to Mark.

"Your potato salad, of course." Mark says easily. He smiles twice, warmly at Mom and then conspiratorially at Amy, Like they have a shared secret. She smiles back. When her mother's out of earshot she leans closer to Mark and whispers:

"You promise?"

"I promise."

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><p>It's in the ass-end of Connecticut, that forsaken northwest corner where no one goes unless they have to. He drives with one hand, swigs from a sweating paper cup of coke with the other. The hastily misfolded map on the passenger seat bears testament to how many times he's considered turning around. He told the chief he needed the day off for a family thing, told Derek he was playing doubles at the racquet club. One half-truth, one lie, one stop at a rural gas station to wrestle with an ancient pump and pick over the sad bucket of wilted carnations. It was that or a cigarette lighter or a pair of three-dollar sunglasses with a fluorescent cord. He nixed those right away; she's already had enough rope to hang herself.<p>

_Did you bring me a present, Mark? _she used to ask, so the flowers will have to suffice.

It's cold inside the low brick building, air conditioning blasting out of every vent. She's got her own room and the privilege of seeing him in there - enough merits or non-demerits or whatever they call them. Good to know she's playing the system. She doesn't look like a manipulator though, she looks small and rather beaten, sitting cross-legged on a sagging mattress, hands gripping her skinny ankles. She doesn't seem to notice the present, hasn't even acknowledged he's there. He looks away from her, at the picked-over breakfast tray on the bare formica table. A congealing lump of egg stares back at him. Amy never liked savory breakfasts. She used to clamor for pancakes and beg to pour the batter out herself. There's a filmy skin on top of the half-drunk coffee. It'll be decaf.

Almost the moment she looks up at him he wonders - yet again - if it was a mistake to come. Her eyes are bleak; the pit of his stomach clenches. He's stil holding that fistful of cheap flowers - _stupid_, he tells himself, but it seemed like a good idea back at the gas station. He extends his hand and she ignores it; he sets the bouquet-of-sorts down on the spotty formica table and his fingers come up sticky. The halogen lights are too bright; he feels nauseated. She's still looking at him - doing that thing where she would just _look_ - always has, since she was a little kid, like she's waiting for something. So he just says it.

"Happy birthday, Amy."

Her lips quiver slightly but she doesn't say anything.

"Can I sit?" He indicates one of the plastic chairs. She lifts one shoulder slightly; he pulls out the chair and lowers himself into it carefully.

He opens his mouth a few more times, tries to push a sentence out, but she ignores him. Twenty-one. Her elbows have the same scabby look they had when she was ten.

_When she was ten..._but when he looks again there's a hardness around her eyes.

A fly buzzes with frantic syncopation against one of the fluorescents, trapped in the plastic rim of the light. He studies it as it struggles, grotesque yet somehow noble. He looks away, then finds himself compelled to look again.

"No one touches me here."

"What?" He looks up at her voice. It's been a while since he's heard it. It's hoarsely familiar.

"No one touches me here."

Mark leans forward, soles of his shoes squeaking on the floor. He feels too big for the hard plastic chairs, like the time he and Derek went to Amy's grade school play and had to hunker down onto miniature benches. He didn't fit into that world, and he doesn't fit into this one.

It smells antiseptic, not like a hospital but more like a nursing home. Like something is decaying. Amy is pale, blue shadows under bluer eyes. He doesn't know what to say, lets her talk instead.

"You said, Mark. You said when I was twenty-one, if I wasn't happy, you would fix it."

"Amy..."

"You don't remember?"

He just looks at her silently.

"I'm not happy," she whispers, softly and unnecessarily.

A curtain of dark hair is hiding her expression. Gently, he reaches forward and nudges some of it off her face. He believes easily that no one touches her here from the way she inclines her face toward his hand. She was never a cuddly child, the rounded type who gives snuggles - she was all sharp elbows and skinned knees and tapping feet.

She'd follow them around asking questions about anything she could think of, but when the Shepherds settled down to watch _A Christmas Carol_ every damn Christmas Eve, the three older girls hogging the ottoman under the same afghan, Derek and Mark in the mirror-image wing chairs and Carolyn knitting rhythmically in the chaise, Amy would settle apart on the carpet with the pillow she dragged from her bedroom and that ragged dog she used to carry everywhere, close to the television. Sometimes her thumb would slip into her mouth, but she usually craned her neck first, twisting her little head around to make sure no one was looking at her to see her shame. Mark noticed when she did it but averted his eyes politely after the first time he saw her yank her fingers from her mouth and flush with embarrssment. When she was very small he or Derek would carry her upstairs after the movie ended. Later they'd just lift her sleeping form to the couch. Finally, they stopped moving her at all.

She always fell asleep though. Even the last Christmas, the one that was spoiled with the crash. Amy was supposedly all grown up then, her full height still inches shorter than the other girls - to her great dismay - and still she sat cross-legged on the floor feet away from everyone else. The ragged dog was long gone, she clutched a cup of coffee instead. She drank a ton of coffee that year, gulping it down and jiggling her foot impatiently between cups. it was never decaf, even at midnight.

She didn't cry that night either, white-faced and stoic at the hospital where they set her broken arm. The ER doctor was gentle with her - Amy must have said something about her major before they got there, because he guided her through the steps he took with a teacher's formality. Amy cocked her head, silent, drinking it in. Mark and Derek sat in hard plastic chairs and watched; they'd let the girls sleep through this at home. "I hope you enjoyed that, Amy," Derek said sharply when the doctor left with a last pat on her shoulder. "That's as close as you're getting to medical school with this on your record." Amy flinched and Mark said nothing even when she looked right at him, not realizing that silence would haunt him later.

It's silent now, except for the damned fly that keeps buzzing. He can hear himself breathing, feel the beads of sweat behind his knees that chilled over in the air conditioning. It might not have mattered, if he'd said something. What was that nursery rhyme? It was in one of the books they'd read to her when she was a kid, with the deceptively cheery pictures hiding the darkness of the words. Those depressing proverbs, smallpox and - Amy loved that book. Why hadn't he said something?

_For want of a nail, the shoe was lost._

He should have spoken up. Doubtful she'll ever be a doctor at this point, but... he could have said something.

_For want of a shoe, the horse was lost._

She's looking at him now, straight at him. His hands rise, sweaty-palmed, from the leg of his jeans, almost of their own accord. Slightly. Slowly.

_For want of a horse, the rider was lost._

Guilt. He's done more for less.

_For want of a rider, the battle was lost._

He covers the last inches between them as his palms close lightly over the flesh in front of them. Gingerly, half disbelieving what he's doing, he tests their weight. Her eyes never leave his. There's nothing but a cheap cotton bra under the flimsy tee-shirt, with wide straps and uncomofrtable-looking metal slides. Everything looks institutional and bleak, down the shapless grey pants. He runs his thumb gently across soft flesh until a stiffened peak pushes back. She inhales sharply.

"Perfect," he says softly. "Nothing to fix."

He starts to lift his hands away and she pushes against them. "Mark..."

He glances at the windowed door.

"They can't see. Not in this corner of the room."

He doesn't want to know how she knows that, or why she needs to.

"I need... no one touches me here," she says, for the third time, and the quiver in her chapped lower lip goes straight through him like a knife. He sees the chances he didn't take and the signals he didn't read as clearly as he sees his arms start to spread. He watches them open as if outside his own body and she folds into him, twisting, sharp corners and metal grommets, her only softness filling his palms. Her head tilts back, mouth open, breathing ragged. She moans, and he shifts awkwardly underneath her, the sound suddenly reminiscent of the way she groaned and keened in detox - a sweaty, wild-eyed little wraith screaming at all of them through her tears.

The fly thrashes inside the light, louder this time.

There are tears now too, but they don't fall. He runs his hands under the thin cotton of her shirt, the gaping waistband of the standard-issue slacks. He's not sure what he's looking for - something soft, some escape from the way her fingernails bite into him and shoulder blades slice at his forearms. He finds warmth and burrows in, the pitch of her moans changing. Now she's nothing like the motionless creature who greeted him: she arcs above him, melts into him, everywhere all at once. A bead of sweat rolls stickily down his neck; moisture clings to her lower lashes but she doesn't look away. When her breath sharpens, he stares at a dent in the plaster wall next to the half-eaten breakfast tray as she shudders against his fingers. Her body is propelled forward; her chin digs hard into his neck and he knows it will bruise. Then she goes limp, flattens like a pancake, her breath faintly wet against his neck.

The fly's a silent black spot now, a blot on the clean halogen square. It's either dead or it's given up fighting, if there's even a difference.

_For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost._

They buzz the room to tell them time's up. She unwraps herself from him, curls onto the thin mattress again, folding her legs under her, exactly as she was when he first arrived. He blinks in the uncomfortably bright fluorescent light. _I'm sorry, _is what he wants to whisper to her. _We were wrong. You can still be a doctor_, but the words stick under his tongue. He leans over to kiss her forehead instead; she doesn't say good-bye. As he closes the windowed door behind him, he fights the uneasy feeling he's taking part of her with him.

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><p>"How'd you do yesterday?" Derek nods at him, prying the caps off two beers, a fingertip of mist escaping from the top of each bottle.<p>

He's suddenly sweating. "What?"

"Tennis."

Right. He fists a hand inside his pocket, takes a cold, welcome swallow with the other. "Uh, two sets." He tries to remember the last game he played. "One each."

"You didn't break the tie?" Derek take a swig of his beer.

"We ran out of time." One lie slips naturally into another. He almost believes it himself. It's easier than he thought it would be. Is that how it was for her too? Just a little fib at first, just to protect something? The lie has a life of its own really, spinning out like a spider preparing its trap.

"Sorry!" Addison's a little out of breath when she hits the bottom stair. Mark lifts a hand in greeting and she smiles briefly at him, but there's a line over her eyebrow she gets when she's concerned.

He's about to ask what's wrong but she goes to Derek's side, presses her head against his shoulder. Derek sets his beer down, shoots Mark a look that says _women_ as clearly as if he'd spoken it.

"Addison? What's going on?"

"Amy." Her voice is muffled in Derek's golf shirt, but Mark hears it.

"I can't understand you." Derek takes her arms and eases her back.

"It's Amy, Derek. Mom called and she...they said they had to put her in solitary, they - they said she had some kind of a breakdown yesterday, and..."

Heat floods his face and his heartbeat starts to pound in his ears.

Derek interrogates Addison with a surgeon's precision, still holding her slightly away from him: "Breakdown? What does that mean? What exactly did the doctor say?"

"I...I don't know."

"Was it even a doctor who called?"

"I don't know, Derek! Mom was upset, and she-"

"They shouldn't have called and gotten her upset," he says shortly, releasing her arms.

Addison swallows hard, takes a shaky breath. Some of her hair has come down from its ponytail and she swipes the loose tendrils away from her face.

"Is she all right?" Mark asks unsteadily.

"I don't know." Addison presses her hand to her mouth and and some of the tears in her eyes spill over. Mark grabs a handful of kleenex from the box next to the sofa and passes them to her.

Derek shakes his head angrily. "Just another flip out, I'm sure. She's unbelievable. The whole point of sending her there was - look, I'll let them know not to bother Mom, okay? Whatever she's trying to pull this time, it's not going work. This is why we had to cut off contact."

Mark stares resolutely over Derek's left shoulder; Addison makes a small noise rather like a kicked puppy. Derek glances sharply at her. "Right?"

"I sent her a card." Addison's voice wobbles. "A few days ago."

Derek frowns. "Addie," he says in the tone Mark recognizes - a heavy tone, weighty with the expectation of agreement. "We talked about this - we decided it wasn't a good idea..."

"It was her birthday," Addison bleats, but she knows his tones as well as Mark and drops her eyes without challenge. "I just want her to get better."

Derek rests a hand on her shoulder. "We all do."

"But she's worse," Addison whispers. "I shouldn't have..."

Derek shakes his head, rubs at the scruffy growth on his chin. "It's not your fault. She's a mess." He looks at Mark.

Mark nods, his chest tight. "Yeah," he echoes, like a good friend would. "A mess."

_Yesterday, though,_ he thinks. _Yesterday you were perfect._


End file.
